#does this still count as second-wave ska

[musicmoreweirdthangood]

Madness, 2023: "What On Earth Is It You Take Me For"

New Madness? In my 2020s? It's more likely than you think

#2020s music #does this still count as second-wave ska #Youtube

[jonathanbogart]

Melodier: Nordic Corporatist Pop and New Wave

Part IV. Youtube. Previously (I, II, III). Dutch, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Finnish pop between 1981 and 1987. Tracklisting below, notes after that.

Elisabeth, “En sømand som dig”

Doe Maar, “De bom”

Belaboris, “Kuolleet peilit”

Lustans Lakejer, “Diamanter”

Lillie-Ane, “Meg selv”

Arbeid Adelt!, “Lekker westers”

Geisha, “Kesä”

Det Neodepressionistiske Danseorkester, “Godt nok mørkt”

Cherry, “Vang me”

Tappi Tíkarrass, “Kríó”

Eva Dahlgren, “Guldgrävarsång”

Svart Klovn, “Knust knekt”

Het Goede Doel, “Net zo lief gefortuneerd”

tv-2, “Vil du danse med mig (nå- nå mix)”

Lolita Pop, “Regn av dagar”

Cirkus Modern, “Karianne”

Madou, “Witte nachten”

Tuula Amberla, “Lulu”

Grafík, “Þúsund sinnum segðu já”

Klein Orkest, “Over de muur”

Di Leva, “I morgon”

Melodier: nordic corporatist pop and new wave

So far in this survey, I’ve been looking at pop scenes in languages I may not entirely speak, but am at least comfortable with. Moving into northern Europe means I’ve left the Romance family behind, and am at the mercy of fan transcribers and Google Translate if I want to understand the lyrics to the songs I enjoy. Lyrics aren’t everything (I couldn’t tell you what some of my favorite songs in English are about) but they’re enough that I’ve at least tried to look up everything I’m presenting for you in this series.

This entry collects together a bunch of nation-states that aren’t necessarily related culturally or historically. Scandinavia only refers to three countries: Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Adding Finland and Iceland makes the “Nordic” countries; but adding in the Netherlands (and Dutch-speaking Belgium, or Flanders), as I have, isn’t anything as far as UN statistical calculations are concerned. They all fit together in my head, though, because they are all stable, prosperous, and socially liberal Western nations with Germanic linguistic roots (except Finland), NATO (except Sweden and Finland) and EU (except Norway) membership, and an extensive welfare state linked to strong unionized labor and government oversight of business: the “corporatist” social organization of my subtitle.

They are all also collectively central to white supremacists’ imagined European identity, and their liberal welfare policies are frequently cited (by racists) as unworkable in more heterogeneous societies. So i’m a little hesitant to be extremely fulsome in my praise here, lest anyone get the wrong idea. For the record, money, access, and individual creativity have far more to do with making great pop music than genetics.

Still, there is undoubtedly an enviable Northern European pop tradition. A lot of that can be traced to a single act: the Swedish ABBA, who borrowed liberally from US and UK pop forms to build a global pop empire based on careful production and universal sentiments. Thanks in part to their pioneering efforts, as well as Dutch acts like Shocking Blue and Golden Earring, a great deal of Northern European pop music was produced in English, with local languages often reserved for traditional folk, comedy records, sentimental ballads — or punk rock. There was particularly a gender-based split here: female Dutch, Danish, and Swedish pop stars were, like Frida and Agnetha, more likely to sing in a universal and generic English, while male rockers could afford to be poets and philosophers in the vernacular. (This is a generalization; but the phenomenon is by no means exclusive to northern Europe, or even across languages.) But regardless of language, there was a Nordic emphasis on slickness of production that means that this mix may, record for record, sound the most expensive of any in this summertime European excavation.

Which is another way of saying it’s the most pop. The low-density Scandinavian countries have few urban populist music traditions like Portuguese fado, Spanish flamenco, French musette, Greek rebetiko, or even Italian canzone napoletana: Protestant hymnody, fishing songs, and a rather austere nineteenth-century European concert repertoire are the most prominent native cultural influences. When American, and especially American Black, music made its midcentury European Invasion (far stronger and more lasting than any Invasion US pop ever suffered), it gave Northern European youth an emotional as well as a physical pop vocabulary. This, the second generation of European rock, made it perhaps more political and personal, but by no means less international.

Because pop is an international language, even when the lyrics are not. Although the subfocus of these mixes has been “new wave,” meaning the sometimes eccentric and often electronic music made under the twin influences of punk and disco, there was less of a noodly self-important rock tradition in these nations than in the English- (or Italian-) speaking world for a new wave to rebel against. Pop thrills remained consistent; only the tools changed.

“Melodier” is the Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian word for “melodies,” and it came to mind because the annual pre-Eurovision national pop contests in the Nordic countries are mostly named some variation of the Swedish Melodifestivalen.

The linguistic breakdowns in the mix, roughly following population counts, are as follows; six Dutch (of which two are Flemish), four Swedish, three each Danish, Norwegian and Finnish, and two Icelandic. Fans of twenty-first century Scandinavian pop may hear some material that presages later developments: a lot happened between ABBA and Robyn, and I’m excited to possibly introduce you to some of it.

1. Elisabeth En sømand som dig Genlyd | Aarhus, 1984

The coastal peninsula-and-archipelago nation of Denmark has been a seafaring one since the Vikings, etc. — but this song isn’t about those ancient sagas, but more recent colonial history, as the lover “Jakarta Danny” is presumably a merchant marine in the service of the Dutch East India Company. Elisabeth first became known to the Danish pop audience as the frontwoman of Voxpop, a Blondie-like pop group, and her first solo album in 1984 is a quiet classic of sultry mid-80s pop moves. This, the leadoff track, uses naval metaphors for sex: the title means “A Seaman Like You,” and the next line is “sailing in me.” The video makes it even more explicit, in more ways than one. She’s still active (her whole catalog is on Spotify), and often does children’s music now.

2. Doe Maar De bom Sky | Amsterdam, 1982

The two-tone wave in the UK had a corresponding wave in the Low Countries and Scandinavia: goofy white dudes are drawn to ska music, as Orange County can attest. Doe Maar (“go ahead,” with connotations of anger or sulkiness) were the Madness of Holland, with a string of skanking, socially observant hits. “De bom,” one of their biggest, means “The Bomb,” and is about the hideous irony of being told to go to school, get a job, and save for retirement, all under the threat of nuclear annihilation.

3. Belaboris Kuolleet peilit Femme Fatale | Helsinki, 1982

The Finnish girl group Belaboris (named for Lugosi and Karloff) was manufactured by producer Kimmo Miettinen, a Malcolm McLaren-esque figure who hired girls to sing and look pretty while a hired band played new wave music. “Kuolleet peilit” (Dead Mirror?) is a minimal-disco jam with a detached vocal by Vilma Vainikainen that looks forward to spacy twenty-first century house: in Finland, such synthpop was known as “futu,” short for futurist. When Belaboris had a second big hit in 1984, it was as an entirely different set of pretty girls.

4. Lustans Lakejer Diamanter Stranded | Stockholm, 1982

In the twenty-first century, Swedish pop is synonymous with a certain ruthless muscularity, often considered the result of pop producer Max Martin’s heavy-metal past. But even here in the early 80s, fey New Romantic band Lustans Lakejer (Lackeys of Lust) takes time out from frontman Johan Kinde’s baleful sneering about diamonds being a girl’s best friend for a flashy guitar solo that fits into glam, post-punk, and metal traditions. Lustans Lakejer were a novelty in late-70s/early-80s Swedish pop, a well-dressed band who proclaimed that their clothes were as important as their music; when Kinde had finally had enough of posing, he dissolved the band, only returning to the name occasionally as a solo act over the years.

5. Lillie-Ane Meg selv RCA Victor | Oslo, 1983

If I were approaching these mixes sensibly, I’d only be including music that had been reissued on CD, or was available on streaming platforms, or something. But having access to the more eclectic and unremunerated catalog of YouTube has ruined me: once I’d heard Lillie-Ane, I couldn’t not include her. She’d been the voice of Norwegian synthpop trio Plann, but her classical training and avant-garde sympathies made her solo material — what I’ve heard of it, which is not enough — weirder and more galvanizing than the rather derivative music she’s still better known for in Norway. She died in 2004; her swooping voice and dense harmonies on “Meg Selv” (Myself) deserve wider appreciation.

6. Arbeid Adelt! Lekker Westers Parlophone | Brussels, 1983

Flemish Belgium in the 1980s is justly famous for its industrial-music scene, with acts like Front 242 and Neon Judgment pioneering sounds that would form the basis of many electronic-rock hybrids in the 1990s. Few of them sang in Dutch, however, apart from Arbeid Adelt!, whose early records were prankstery lock-groove new wave. Once Luc van Acker (later of Revolting Cocks) joined, though, things got harsher, and “Lekker Westers” (Yummy Westerners), with its satirical singsong melody over dissonant grooves, is halfway between their Devoesque beginnngs and the industrial harshness that put Belgium on the map

7. Geisha Kesä Johanna | Helsinki, 1983

The all-female Finnish trio Geisha only released a single EP during their brief existence, but because it was on the legendary Helsinki indie label Johanna, they’ve been compiled and fondly remembered by Finnish rock fans for decades since. “Kesä” (Summer) is of a piece with the moody, dry sound of Finnish goth rock of the period, but its danceable rhythm and spectacular clattery all-percussion instrumental break suggest that they had a lot more to offer beyond being a distaff Musta Paraati.

8. Det Neodepressionistiske Danseorkester Godt nok mørkt Genlyd | Aarhus, 1986

A Danish band that began as an art-installation soundtrack and ended as a sampladelic pop act, DND (for short; their full title, as might be presumed, translates as The Neodepressionist Dance-Band) were rather inspired by the Talking Heads’ combination of dance rhythms and irony-laden cultural critique; their debut album was called Flere sange om sex og arbejde, or More Songs About Sex and Work. This song, “Good Enough [in the] Dark,” features leader Helge Dürrfeld mutter-rapping about the limits of perception while a passionate saxophone wheels endlessly and a sassy chorus chants the title.

9. Cherry Vang me Vertigo | Utrecht, 1982

Cherry Wijdenbosch is, if not the first person of color to appear in these mixes (which reflects my desire to keep back some key acts from former colonies for later inclusion around the globe more than any unadulterated whiteness of 80s European pop), is certainly the first Black woman. Of mixed Indonesian and Surinamese (which latter is to say African slave) descent, she had a couple of jazz-inflected Nederpop hits in the early 80s before becoming a cabaret act. Her debut single, “Vang me” (Catch Me), is a breezy but clear-eyed love song that borrows some of Jona Lewie’s dry music-hall delivery and adds a Manhattan Transfer kick to the middle eight.

10. Tappi Tíkarrass Kríó Gramm | Reykjavik, 1983

The eighteen-year-old singer, with her clear, youthful, and powerful voice, is nearly the only reason anyone has heard of this post-punk band; if she had not gone on to front bands K.U.K.L. and Sugarcubes, not to mention her own global superstardom as a mononymic solo artist, Tappi Tíkarrass might be an undiscovered gem rather than a pored-over Da Vinci Code by which adepts seek to unlock the mysteries of her sacred genius. This song, which predicts the soft-loud dynamics of 90s alt-rock with almost a shrug, is, according to internet Björkologists, the cry of an elderly man searching for his tern.

11. Eva Dahlgren Guldgrävarsång Polar | Stockholm, 1984

Discovered on a 1978 talent show, Dahlgren wouldn’t be a true pan-Scandinavian star until her 1991 adult-pop classic En blekt blondins hjärta (A Bleach Blonde’s Heart), but I really like her 1984 album Ett fönster mot gatan (A Window to the Street). The title of this slow-burn anthem, the leadoff track, can be translated as “Gold-digger’s song,” and is a reference to an early twentieth-century Swedish hit about Swedish immigrants failing to strike it rich in America: Dahlgren interiorizes the sentiment, making it a song about a streetwalker who dreams of finding a place where she can “kiss my brothers and sisters.” She would come out as gay in the 1990s, and is married to her partner of many years.

12. Svart Klovn Knust knekt Uniton | Oslo, 1983

Probably the most legendary Norwegian minimal-synth (I almost said synthpop, and then I remembered a-ha) single, “Knust knekt” (Shattered Jacks, as in the playing card) is a miniature masterpiece of mood. The lyrics, as far as I can determine, are standard post-punk gloom about moral corruption, but the sound and image of Svart Klovn (Black Clown), the alter ego of Svenn Jakobsen, are among the most striking in all Scandinavian pop.

13. Het Goede Doel Net zo lief gefortuneerd CNR | Utrecht, 1984

Dutch new wave duo Het Goede Doel (The Good Cause) were second only to Doe Maar in popularity, with a string of sarcastic, melodic hits that occasionally remind me of mid-period XTC. The opening orchestral hits belie the crooning tenderness of this portrait of callowness and privilege (the title is “Just So Sweet [and] Wealthy”), only tipping its satiric hand when Henk Westbroek sings on the prechorus that naturally he wanted to marry his mother.

14. tv-2 Vil du danse med mig CBS | Copenhagen, 1984

Akin to U2 in their longevity, success, and consistency (they’ve had the same four-man lineup since 1982), tv-2 are perhaps the most successful Danish band ever. Formed from the ashes of prog-hippy band Taurus and new-wave band Kliché, they started with an industrial sound that gradually brightened: this song (Will You Dance With Me) is one of the signature sounds of mid-80s Scandinavian pop. With muttered verses about how shitty men are after the initial bloom of romance is over, the chorus (and its saxophone riff) returning constantly to the moment when he asks her to dance is a sharp and poignant evocation of memory.

15. Lolita Pop Regn av dagar Mistlur | Stockholm, 1985

The small city of Örebro in inland Sweden was far distant from the Paisley Underground scene swirling around Los Angeles in the early 80s, but a band with the same influences — the Velvet Underground, Roxy Music, the Beatles — formed there, and with crisp Stockholm production seemed to predict the alternate-tuned 90s of Tanya Donelly and Letters to Cleo. “Regn av dagar” is “Rain for Days,” and the lyric is similarly 90s-depressed, while the rock band behind singer Karin Wistrand chimes and chugs along.

16. Cirkus Modern Karianne Sonet | Oslo, 1984

The songs I’ve chosen from Norway are all representative of more left-of-center pop than the more mainstream work I’ve chosen from Sweden and Denmark. Partly that reflects the the fact that Norway was just a smaller regional scene, but partly it’s that Norwegian pop is not well documented online. Cirkus Modern were a moderately successful post-punk act who produced two albums and an EP, which makes them by far the most prolific Norwegian act represented here: “Karianne” is a joyfully raucous (and slightly unsettling) jam that reminds me of when the Cure went pop circa “Lovecats.”

17. Madou Witte nachten Lark | Antwerp, 1982

The Dutch musical genre of “kleinkunst” (literally “little art”) can be compared to the German “kabarett” (cabaret) but includes folk-musical forms and socially critical lyrics. Madou, an experimental Flemish band centered around singer Vera Coomans and pianist and composer Wiet Van de Leest, brought kleinkunst into the new wave scene, with dark songs about abuse, incest, and suicide. “Witte nachten” (white or sleepless nights), despite its vaudevillian bounce, is sung from the perspective of a child whose mother shares her bed to escape the father’s fists.

18. Tuula Amberla Lulu Selecta | Turku, 1984

I may have stretched the definition of new wave to the breaking point with “Lulu” — the jazz manouche violin and general 1930s air (at least until the crisp Cars-y electric guitar solo) might sound too much like a nostalgia act for the rest of this mix. But Tuula Amberla was the lead singer of gothy post-punk band Liikkuvat Lapset, and the lyrics, written by doctor and songwriter Jukka Alihanka after a poem by sculptor and architect Alpo Jaakola, are about the decadent nightlife of modern Helsinki, as the video makes clear.

19. Grafík Þúsund sinnum segðu já GRAF | Reykjavik, 1984

Iceland’s vibrant and highly original music scene has gotten really short shrift from this mix, thanks to its tiny population. There’s lots more to dig into where this came from. But when I ran an initial survey of European music of 1984 some months ago, this sparkling gem of a pop song stood out immediately. Part Huey Lewis (that shiny production), part Prefab Sprout (those lovelorn melodies), all Grafík, perhaps Iceland’s premier pop-rock band of the 80s (at least until the Sugarcubes came along), “A Thousand TImes Say Yes”  is a plea for total romantic commitment that comes across in any language.

20. Klein Orkest Over de muur Polydor | Amsterdam, 1984

One of the key songs of the Cold-War 80s, “Over de muur” is sometimes classed as a protest song, but if so it’s hard to parse which side it’s protesting. Making a clear-eyed examination of the repressive idealism of the Communist East as well as of the gluttonous “freedom” of the Democratic West, singer Harrie Jekkers’ real sympathies are with the birds who can fly over the Berlin Wall at will, as he imagines a day when the people will be able to do the same.

21. Di Leva I morgon Mistlur | Stockholm, 1987

Born Sven Thomas Magnusson, he adopted the stage name Thomas Di Leva when he joined the punk band the Pillisnorks as a teenager. His next band was Modern Art, and he went solo in 1982, at the age of 19. One of the most fascinating and creative Swedish pop stars of the early 80s, he drew inspiration from glam, electronic experiments, traditional pop, and eventually, Eastern mysticism. Those New Age leanings are all over “I morgon” (Tomorrow), which combines an up-to-the-moment U2 chug with Di Leva’s early-70s Bowie wail to create an extended, lightly trippy meditation on being, time, and the unknowableness of reality. He’s since become a New Age guru and life coach; but his early music is still really interesting.

Okay, that’s it. Join me next time when I’ll be looking at the Neue Deutsche Welle (and the Neue Österreichische Welle, and the Neue Schweizer Welle). I’m over the hump: there are three mixes left to go in this series. Thanks for reading and listening. If you want to talk to me about what I’ve compiled, or what I’ve said about it. I’m around.

#my mixology career

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Astronomers just made one giant leap in solving a bizarre cosmic mystery

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/astronomers-just-made-one-giant-leap-in-solving-a-bizarre-cosmic-mystery/

Astronomers just made one giant leap in solving a bizarre cosmic mystery

A view from CSIRO’s Australian SKA Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope antenna 29, with the phased array feed receiver in the center, Southern Cross on the left and the Moon on the right. (CSIRO/Alex Cherney/)

What comes to mind when you try to picture the most powerful object in the universe? Maybe an atomic bomb, or an ultra-powerful sun, right? Well, let me introduce you to the Fast Radio Burst: a strange phenomenon that stretches for just a few thousandths of a second, but can emit more energy than the sun does in 80 years. Thousands of FRBs flash throughout space at any given moment, yet for something so ubiquitous and so powerful, we know almost bupkis about how and why they’re formed. Much of that has to do with the fact that, since first discovering them in 2007, scientists have never been completely sure where they’re coming from. Are they expelled by black holes? Are they extensions of erratic stars running amok? Are they signs of intelligent extraterrestrials trying to communicate with us?

We’ve just taken a massive step forward in resolving that question. In a study published Thursday in Science, an international team reports the first-ever localization the origin point of a non-repeating FRB. “This was the first [FRB] where we both found it and had the right type of data to localize it,” says Keith Bannister, an astronomer with Australia’s Commonwealth Science and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) and the lead author of the new paper. “We had to build what we called the ‘live action replay’ mode in the telescope to localize this FRB.”

That ‘live action replay’ system could be the groundbreaking innovation we need to finally uncover which bizarre cosmic phenomena are producing and firing off FRBs into the rest of the universe.

“It’s a really great discovery,” says Brian Metzger, an astrophysicist at Columbia University in New York City, who was not involved with the study. “I don’t want to compare them directly, but in some ways, a localization is worth 100 events where we don’t know from where they’re coming from. There’s so much context you can get.”

The focus is on FRB 180924, now the 86th FRB detected by astronomers. Such signals are notoriously transient, and this one was just 1.3 milliseconds long—barely a blip to the human mind.

Theories on what’s producing these signals include conventional explanations like black holes or neutron stars or highly energetic supernovae, along with more offbeat options like blitzars (a hypothetical version of a pulsar) or dark matter collapses. And yes, sometimes people suggest they might come from aliens. One of the most lauded theories in recent years was pitched by Metzger and a couple of his colleagues, who suggested that the FRBs were effects of hyperactive flares from young magnetars (neutron stars accompanied by extra-powerful magnetic fields).

To be fair, this is actually not the first FRB ever. In 2017, scientists managed to pinpoint the home galaxy for a repeating FRB, FRB 121102 (one of only two observed on record). While still a difficult task, the repeated detections gave astronomers clues for where to look, and they ended up tracking it down to a weak dwarf galaxy 3 billion light-years away with a high rate of star formation.

As you can imagine, a one-off FRB is even more difficult to source. “The key is to have a telescope that can both find FRBs and is big enough, in terms of distance between antennas, to localize them,” says Bannister. “Previous telescopes have had one or the other, but not both.”

CSIRO has a trick up its sleeve that makes this task possible: the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), a 36-dish radio telescope array located in Western Australia. In the past, all of ASKAP’s dishes were typically pointing in different directions, throwing a wrench into efforts to more accurately characterize the signal, including its point of origin.

Obviously, the simple remedy to this problem was to rearrange ASKAP’s dishes so they all pointed toward the same part of the sky. But Bannister and his team also took extra steps into improving the systems that make FRB data collection possible, customizing the hardware so it could make a billion different measurements per second, and creating novel software that could crunch those numbers in real-time.

The Milky Way galaxy stretches above the core group of CSIRO’s ASKAP. (CSIRO/Alex Cherney/)

So here’s how the “live action replay” system works: once ASKAP detects an FRB, data collection halts and the software proceeds to download all the raw data collected by each dish in the last three seconds. The original signal will actually arrive at each radio dish at different times, and astronomers can use these fraction-of-a-nanosecond lags to assess the position of the FRB with a precision of about 0.1 arcseconds—“equivalent to a human hair at a distance of 200 meters,” says Bannister.

The team then imaged the origin point and measured out the distance using three of Earth’s most powerful ground-based telescopes (The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope in Chile, the Keck telescope in Hawaii, and the Gemini South telescope in Chile).

As a result, we now know FRB 180924 sits on the outer rim of a galaxy 3.6 billion light years away in the constellation Grus, comparable to the size, shape, and luminosity of the Milky Way. As with other FRBs, interstellar gas caused FRB 180924 to slow down occasionally, through an effect called “dispersion.” Astronomers can actually use dispersion as a way to gauge what sort of gas and how much of it an FRB has zipped through on its way to Earth, giving us some sense as to what kind of matter lies between point A and point B and what kind of journey the signal took.

“For a non-repeating FRB, we get one shot to find it and measure its position, and the ASKAP team has done it beautifully,” says Shriharsh Tendulkar, an astronomer at McGill University in Montreal who was not involved in the study.

There is some confusion arising in trying to reconcile this new origin point with the dwarf galaxy that’s home to FRB 121102. it’s hard to fathom both galaxies producing the same type of inexplicably high-energy phenomena when the difference in size and luminosity between them is 1,000-fold.

“If anything, this discovery has thrown open more questions,” says Bannister. “We now know that FRBs can happen in quite passive parts of the universe. We previously thought you needed a lot of vigorous star formation to make FRBs.” He thinks the new findings disfavor a few models: the fact that FRB 180924 is coming from the outskirts of its galaxy raises doubts about the theory that supermassive black holes lodged at the center of galaxies are the usual source. Very young stars, like young magnetars formed after supernovae, are probably counted out as well, as are any explanations that don’t require any sort of galactic body. “We have to go back to the drawing board to understand how FRBs can happen in such a wide range of environments.”

Not everyone is convinced the new findings necessitate a radical shift in our current FRB theories. James Cordes, an astronomer at Cornell University who did not participate in the study, thinks it’s still a safe bet that neutron stars, particularly magnetars, are the most likely source for FRB production. The most major implication, he says, has to do with the theory that FRBs are formed in super luminous supernovae that are preferentially formed in dwarf galaxies with low concentrations of metals. “That may still be true to some extent, but the new FRB and its galaxy present a possible counter example,” he says.

There’s also the possibility that repeating and non-repeating FRBs are simply governed by different models. “Finding a young magnetar in the outskirts of a massive galaxy with old stars is like finding a whale in the Sahara,” says Tendulkar. “It is very early in the field of course, but this might suggest that repeating and non-repeating FRBs come from completely different origins,” and that the magnetar model only holds true for the latter.

Metzger himself doesn’t think the findings exclude magnetars outright. It may just be that magnetars are more diverse and form in more cosmic scenarios than previously presumed. “There may be more possible ways to produce these FRB-producing magnetars,” he says. “And nature might have more than one way to produce a fast radio burst.”

We’ll only answer those questions once we collect more FRB data, and it’s quite clear Bannister and his team have paved a new path for probing these phenomena in great depth. Localizing the origin point provides a much narrower window for identifying what objects at the scene of the crime could fire things off. More immediately, scientists can use FRB dispersion as a more robust way to map out the distribution of matter throughout the universe—which ought to be a boon for answering some cosmological questions. “This type of approach is the wave of the future,” says Cordes.

(Just don’t hold your hopes out for anyone to come out and say it’s aliens. It’s never aliens.)

Written By Neel V. Patel

#Technology